The Mosque at Ground Zero

by | Sep 11, 2010


No – not the planned Islamic Community Centre in Park Place – but the prayer room on the 51st floor of World Trade Center’s South Tower, where some of the building’s Muslims used to gather to pray:

“We weren’t aliens,” Mr. Abdus-Salaam, 60, said in a telephone interview from Florida, where he moved in retirement. “We had a foothold there. You’d walk into the elevator in the morning and say, ‘Salaam aleikum,’ to one construction worker and five more guys in suits would answer, ‘Aleikum salaam.’ ”

One of those men in suits could have been Zafar Sareshwala, a financial executive for the Parsoli Corporation, who went to the prayer room while on business trips from his London office. He was introduced to it, he recently recalled, by a Manhattan investment banker who happened to be Jewish.

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

There was a more makeshift facility at the top of the North Tower – a stairwell, where the Muslim staff of Windows on the World would “lay a tablecloth atop the concrete landing in the stairwell and flatten cardboard boxes from food deliveries to serve as prayer mats.”

Update: Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich (with his third wife, Callista – seemingly the first adult woman to be synthesized in a test tube) has released a new feature film, hailing “the end of times… the final struggle” against Islam.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPBv1tZhd-E&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Newt, who plans to run for President, claims that “America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” Happy times.

Author

  • David Steven is a senior fellow at the UN Foundation and at New York University, where he founded the Global Partnership to End Violence against Children and the Pathfinders for Peaceful, Just and Inclusive Societies, a multi-stakeholder partnership to deliver the SDG targets for preventing all forms of violence, strengthening governance, and promoting justice and inclusion. He was lead author for the ministerial Task Force on Justice for All and senior external adviser for the UN-World Bank flagship study on prevention, Pathways for Peace. He is a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of The Risk Pivot: Great Powers, International Security, and the Energy Revolution (Brookings Institution Press, 2014). In 2001, he helped develop and launch the UK’s network of climate diplomats. David lives in and works from Pisa, Italy.


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